Many readers will be familiar with the name Bit Torrent, yet might be less familiar with the creator of Bit Torrent, Bram Cohen.
We've been lucky enough to grab a few minutes of Bram's time and talk to him on a variety of issues; Bram talks about his views on piracy, the growth in Bit Torrent use, and the protocol's use for software piracy.
Click "read more" to see what Bram has to say.
View: Bram's Website | Bit Torrent
View: How does Bit Torrent Work?
We've been lucky enough to grab a few minutes of Bram's time and talk to him on a variety of issues; Bram talks about his views on piracy, the growth in Bit Torrent use, and the protocol's use for software piracy.
Click "read more" to see what Bram has to say.
View: Bram's Website | Bit Torrent View: How does Bit Torrent Work?
Firstly, could you tell us about yourself, your history?
I've been into recreational mathematics most of my life, and worked in software startups for a while after dropping out of college before starting work on BitTorrent.
Tell us about BitTorrent- what was the inspiration? What were you trying to achieve with the protocol?
I had a lot of experience working on networking protocols, and was interested in exploring what I thought were the reasonable problems to work on. My main goal was to make it cheap to distribute large, popular files, which I of course succeeded in doing.
BitTorrent, it was recently suggested, was carrying as much as 30% of the webs traffic; how did you re-act to this news?!
I don't have any visceral concept of how much that bandwidth that really is, so it's mostly just surreal.
Moving onto BitTorrent uses at the moment - it'd be hard to ignore the arguably most common use of the protocol - piracy. How do you feel about this? Did you think about the potential for 'abuse' when you conceived the protocol?
Given the history of such tools, it's fairly obvious that the general public has a strong interest in piracy.
A group have created a new program called eXeem which appears to solve one of the problems BitTorrent has- that off tracking torrents. Have you seen the program, and if so, what do you think of it?
It's yet another napster/kazaa/edonkey/hotline/whatever. BitTorrent usage is doing quite well without it.
Moving on, the protocol has clearly many legitimate uses; have you seen any especially unique implementations?
They're all just pushing around bits, which is about all I care about.
How do you think companies are going to deal with bandwidth in years to come - do you think it will be something along the lines of bit torrent, or something radically different?
Peer to peer as an approach is here to stay.
What's cool technology wise in the Cohen house hold at the moment? What'd be your pick for the "next big thing"?
I've also been working on the Codeville version control system and designing twisty puzzles. I don't know what the next big thing is.
Finally, what does the future hold for yourself?! What are you working on at the moment?
I'm continuing to work on BitTorrent.
[quotw]It's yet another napster/kazaa/edonkey/hotline/whatever. BitTorrent usage is doing quite well without it.[/quote]
It would be nice to see more than just one sentence as an answer, he didn't seem to even try and answer the questions. At least that is how it reads to me.
It's understandable if he doesn't want to comment much on piracy, try to get into a fight with exeem by spewing arguments against it, and also hard to foresee the future so questions related to that went unanswered as well. He just seems like a guy who carefully thinks his answers over to me.
Not a coincidence he gave a more thorough answer about inspiration for BT, etc. It's stuff he can easier answer without getting controversial or anything.
the questioned were very closed and short answers.
They needed more open ended questioned that he'd need to give a more detailed answer.
Yes
It's ok
= bad questioned
but some were good but i guess he was short nd sweet in those to cover his own ass
If he even hints that he suspected that his technology was ideal at piracy while developing it he's in deep sh!t
Why would you think that? Even if BitTorrent is a popular tool for piracy, it clearly has legitimate uses. Even if it didn't, there are no laws against developing software purely for piracy. If you host a central server through which pirated files pass, you'll get shut down, but that's because they can push on the issue of pirated files, they have no ground to stand on regarding the issue of developing software to facilitate piracy - it doesn't become illegal until it's used for that purpose, and at that point, it's not the responisibility of the author what you do with it.
bit torrent is still clearly better if u ask me
spyware has been removed.
Last edited by 47548 on 10 Feb 2005 - 05:53
Peer to peer as an approach is here to stay.
Lol, cheer up bram. must be that no one uses his client or donates enough money to him.
Make brams valentine and send him some money
with that said, i feel as if he was a little to straight to the point. obviously he is a busy man and all of that, but a good amount of the questions were longer than his answers.
and i see me and toastedcrumpets thought the same thing. LOL
His resume makes no reference to Valve, but it's not up to date as his employment history only goes up to March 2001, unless that is all of his employment - in the general sense - history. That and the Bittorrent site donation page states "I maintain BitTorrent for a living. This is my only job." which leads me to believe that Bram and Valve didn't hit it off.
Oh well.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/bramcohen/7932.html
Get your terminology right writers
That line should read "was carrying as much as 30% of the Internets traffic". While Bittorrent can use the web for seeding, the vast majority of data is not transfered over the web.
Technically speaking, it should be "an apostrophe".
ABC and a half!
good job neowin
Bram just sent me a reply.
Thanks for the link. You should tell the whiners complaining about how short my answers are that I do on average over one interview a day and they should be thankful that I do online interviews at all.
Cut the guy a bit of slack.
i do have a problem with cheesy and softball questions neowin asked.
Sounds pretty bang on, nice going people.
Reading the interview and not knowing he had AS did make him look like an ass. I am dyslexic and people complain about how I write until they find out I have dyslexia, I don't hold it against them as I can't help it and if they don't know then I am just write badly. People just compare to the norm, I do it so I can't say it is wrong when others do it to me. I doubt very much that Bram takes it personally, if he is hurt by my comments then I apologise.
i aint complaining with his answer... people need to back up off both of em... it aint like he has to peach a sermon to give a decent interview u know
What a complete non-entity
In the 80s, Alexei Pajitnov created the code for Tetris and it quickly became popular in Russia's academic circles. The USSR then claimed rights to it and hence a rights war was started between Bullet Proof Software, Mirrorsoft and later Nintendo. The funny thing about this was that despite the argument, Pajitnov was out of the light concerning Tetris and didn't receive anything for it despite the game's popularity.
Fortunately, Pajitnov is nowadays working for Microsoft Game Studios. Point is that just because someone isn't always in the spotlight doesn't make them any less than before
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